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THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 26, 2015
days of Vidal's relationship with Aus-
ten, whom he met in 1950, begins,
"A key memory of their relationship
(for me) dates to the late eighties." It
seems unlikely that Vidal would have
become the subject of one of Parini's
books---alongside Melville, Tolstoy,
Faulkner, and Jesus---if not for the per-
sonal connection.
Yet it would be hard to imagine a
less intimate biography. Parini loved
spending time with the worldly, wound-
less Vidal, and he seems eager to per-
petuate Vidal's myths about himself.
In a letter from the late forties, Vidal
wrote that psychoanalysis is "quite a
frightening experience," and that "it's
not a pleasant thing to see oneself." But
when Vidal tells Parini that his expe-
rience of therapy failed because "I have
no unconscious," the biographer doesn't
pause to comment.
The book's use of Anaïs Nin is par-
ticularly disappointing. Parini quotes
Nin's initial description of Vidal ("clear
and bright" and "luminous and manly")
but little else, and his account of their
relationship reveals limited acquain-
tance with what she wrote. Parini says
that Vidal tried to interest Dutton in
Nin's fiction but failed, because Dut-
ton---"a manly house"---"shied away
from anyone like Nin, who exuded
both femininity and exoticism." But
any reader of Nin's diaries would know
that, in December of 1945, Vidal
o ered her a thousand-dollar advance
for her novels, and that Dutton pub-
lished "Ladders to Fire" the follow-
ing year.
Parini justifies his brisk treatment
of Nin by saying that the published
version of her diaries tells "only a bit
of the story." This is no doubt true.
But, given that Parini did not visit Nin's
archive, he might have spent more time
with them, not only because of their
tender closeup portrait of Vidal in his
early twenties but because they help
to solve the central problem of any lit-
erary biography: how to connect the
life and the work.
Considering Vidal's failure to be-
come a poet, Parini accepts his sub-
ject's glib explanation: "The Muse
passed over my doorstep." Nin o ers
another perspective. In her account, all
Vidal's shortcomings were rooted in
the refusal of feeling. After reading
clever take-o s, imitate public figures."
He is also "lonely," "hypersensitive,"
"insecure." When Vidal opened up to
her---"He dropped his armor, his de-
fenses"---it was not to talk about his
grandfather the senator or his father
the aviator but his mother the deserter.
"Psychologically," Nin wrote, "he knows
the meaning of his mother abandon-
ing him when he was ten, to remarry
and have other children."
At first, Vidal was thrilled by the
connection. Returning from a trip to
Washington, D.C., he told her, "You
have cast a spell on me. What I once
accepted, I now do not like. I found my
grandfather, the senator, boring." But
the spell soon wore o . In March of
1946, Vidal invited Nin to a dinner at
the PEN Club. "Was shocked by the me-
diocrity of the talks," she wrote. "A 'lit-
erary' world so thoroughly political, in-
triguing, and commercial, but a world
Gore intends to conquer." The next
month, she writes, "Gore in the world
is another Gore. He is insatiable for
power. He needs to conquer, to shine,
to dominate." In November, she notes
that Vidal's letters---he had then re-
treated to write in a Guatemalan mon-
astery that he had acquired for a pit-
tance---"sound attenuated, diminished,
dulled. Lack of faith, of responsiveness
to surroundings and people. A blight."
By December, she admits defeat: "What-
ever Gore was with me, whatever side
he showed me, was not the one he was
to show in his life and in his work."
"The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume
Four: 1944-1947" was published in 1971,
and Nin's use of the past tense carries
a hint of retrospect, as if she were tak-
ing account of later developments. In
1970, the composer Ned Rorem, an-
other diarist friend, described the "cyn-
ical stance" that Vidal had perfected
over the previous quarter century: "Those
steely epigrams summing up all sub-
jects resemble the bars of a cage through
which he peers defensively. 'It's not
that love's a farce---it doesn't exist.' . . .
Rather than risk being called a softy, he
a ects a pose of weariness."
Jay Parini, in his authorized biog-
raphy, "Empire of Self: A Life of
Gore Vidal" (Doubleday), wants to
give us the real Gore, but he keeps
on falling for the pose. Although Pa-
rini exhibits some skepticism toward
his subject, and notices that Vidal's
claim of indi erence to the world's
opinion was at odds with the many
framed magazine covers and threats
of libel suits, he begins each chapter
with an epigraph culled from Vidal's
table talk and publicity spiel. When
it comes to telling the story of the
life, Parini proves content to deliver
the strapping, self-assured, untouch-
able Vidal, the builder and overseer
of a well-protected, many-colonied
"empire of self "---a phrase repeated
throughout the book, in a dizzying
range of connections.
As Parini approaches Vidal's later
years, his defensive instincts go into
overdrive. He praises an essay on John
Updike---ten thousand words of ill-ar-
gued bile---as "a kind of cultural ser-
vice," and declares Vidal "more rele-
vant than ever" in the years after 9/11,
when he was in the habit of writing
things like: "The unlovely Osama
was chosen on aesthetic grounds to be
the frightening logo for our long-
contemplated invasion and conquest
of Afghanistan."
Vidal is the book's leading witness,
though not a reliable one; his testimony
is undermined by what the novelist
Adam Mars-Jones called "delusions of
candour," and possibly by delusions of
a di erent sort.Though Parini believes
that Vidal gave more interviews than
any writer "in the history of literature,"
his notes, which are far from compre-
hensive, contain thirty references to in-
terviews conducted when his subject
was in his eighties. Five of the conver-
sations took place in 2010, the year that
Vidal began to su er the e ects of
Wernicke-Korsako syndrome, or "wet
brain," which Parini calls "a stage in al-
coholism when the drinker begins to
lose touch with reality."
The underlying problem is a lack
of distance. Parini met Vidal in the
mid-nineteen-eighties, and the two be-
came great friends. They spoke on the
phone every week---"for periods on a
daily basis"---and spent time together
in a dozen cities. Parini cannot resist
playing Boswell any more than he can
resist making the Boswell comparison,
and it has a damaging e ect on his role
as biographer. A sentence from a pas-
sage ostensibly dealing with the early